In Star Wars: Andor, the future of space exploration is empire at scale
Charting the half-life of the Galactic Empire in outer space
Spoiler warning for Star Wars: Andor Season 1. Please proceed accordingly!
“Whatever happened to empire in the second half of the 20th century, it did not simply vanish. Rather, it lingers on, even beyond the planet, amid the faint beckoning glow of the stars.” — Peter Redfield, The half-life of empire in outer space
Star Wars has always been political. The original trilogy, released from 1977 to 1983, uses the struggle between the Galactic Empire and the Rebel Alliance as a proxy for the U.S.’s failed war in Vietnam, a framing George Lucas has very clearly acknowledged. In contrast, the prequel trilogy (1999–2005) has been frequently compared to the War on Terror and the rise of George W. Bush. In this case, the similarities between the movies and “real life” are less intentional, as Lucas planned the prequels long before Bush’s presidency and was focused on the fall of more classical republics (as well as continuing to pull the thread of the U.S.’s response to Vietnam).
These distinctions between artists’ political inspiration and their subsequent impact reflect the nature of making art. Audiences bring themselves to the work, including their current political realities; as such, Star Wars movies are consistently interpreted through highly personal, and sometimes highly politicized, lenses. And as Star Wars content continues to be made, it is now our turn to project, not only onto the films of the past, but also the Star Wars being made right now.
Luckily for me, the Star Wars being made right now includes Star Wars: Andor.
What makes Andor so fascinating is its focus on how empire maintains and reproduces itself. Its first season explores the multiple axes of exploitation that empires must employ to sustain themselves, including siphoning natural resources, culturally flattening colonized peoples, and entraining as many workers as they can into their systems of extraction. This depiction is highly specific, yet highly familiar — Andor’s writers have studied historical empires extensively, and applied what they’ve learned to a galactic scale. The Empire strip-mines whole planets, systematically eradicates cultures, and abuses a prison workforce at a galactic scale.
For those of us that work in space exploration, it is very clear that, for all the talk that circulates of “utopian space futures”, the current trajectory of western space exploration’s plans, from mining the Moon to colonizing Mars, leads us not to utopia, but to Andor. When nationalism, colonialism, and militarism are we have on earth, that is also what we will have in space. It’s very helpful of Andor to show us how current leaders in space exploration, from government space agencies to commercial space companies, would treat the Solar System, if given vastly improved technology! It’s now up to those of us who reject this space future, within as well as outside of the space community, to build a better one.
The function of this piece is twofold: to use several of Andor’s themes, and the planets on which those themes play out, to discuss how imperialism functions within space exploration past and present, and to consider what rejecting this space future might mean for space exploration. My goal is not to show that Andor the television show also contains a critique of modern space exploration; it doesn’t, because that is outside its scope. Andor, and Star Wars more broadly, just provides some useful examples of empire in a space setting. I’m here to take things a little further, with the help of those who’ve analysed space as a site of modern empire.
The story of Kenari, Kassa’s (now Cassian Andor’s), home planet, is one of ecological exploitation. As he walks, the camera follows Kassa past massive open pit mines carved deep into the planet, which seem to have been completely abandoned. Kenari is not a dead world, but it is a dying one; it is a planet stripped and polluted, where children have been abandoned by any higher form of government and left to make their way in an environment that is likely contaminated. We will never know what the “mining disaster” was that caused the Empire (and probably also the Republic) to ban travel from Kenari, but the result is the same: an entire world, and its people, left to stew in a toxic mess brought in by outsiders looking to squeeze the planet dry.
There is much worth noting when considering how Andor portrays Kenari. I’ve identified two major points: first, Kenari is a reminder that, if given infinite space and time (i.e., an entire planet’s worth of resources), ecological imperialism will not and cannot approach equilibrium with the planet’s landscape, despite what it may claim. Instead, it will do as the mine operators do on Kenari: inevitably over-use, tipping the system into planet-wide catastrophe. Second, the ambiguous disaster that left the mines empty and the children alone is not, technically, a disaster caused by the Empire; it occurred during the waning years of the Galactic Republic. As Lucas’ prequels and the subsequent Clone Wars animated series illustrate, the Republic’s last decades were a slow but steady slide into fascism that began long before Palpatine inaugurated his empire. As with the Roman Republic’s transition into the Roman Empire, imperialism does not begin when something finally names itself an empire.
Physical resource extraction from conquered and/or colonized regions is essential to empire. Such practices remain visible in the Global South, including in mining, from lithium in Chile to cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo. While most nation-states today name themselves republics or democracies, as Star Wars teaches us, something’s name is less important than the things it does, and much of the western world is bound up in the exploitation of resources. Mining disasters like that on Kenari kill workers and contaminate ecosystems every year, often in South America, Africa, and Central Asia. They are a small and terrible part of a much larger system dedicated to sustaining production of “critical” technology for the Global North, such as smartphones, data centers, and, yes, the high-tech world of space exploration.
The spectre of resource mining is not far from the minds of those controlling modern-day space exploration. Mining the Moon, Mars, and asteroids has been a constant, though largely hypothetical, fixture of discussions since the beginning of the Space Race. While largely confined to the realm of science fiction, the rise of commercial space threatens to make extraterrestrial mining a reality, with numerous companies founded for the express purpose of finding a way to “support sustainable exponential human growth” (TransAstra) with “no environmental impact on our home planet” (Karman+). No more unsightly containment pools and open pits! We can offset those costs onto places in the Solar System most people will never see, much like how the people of the Galactic Core never set foot on Kenari.
To accept this line of thinking is to begin to treat planetary bodies as sites of extraction, rather than centers of knowledge, and we cannot have both. This is the contradiction of space exploration: something that purports to allow us to do science, while also “doing” the nationalist project. We cannot learn about a place respectfully if we are also turning it inside out to strip it for parts. Asteroid and lunar mining companies assert that their work would be a blameless crime; after all, there are no people on the Moon, no ecosystems to destroy on Vesta (that we know of). We have invented a new “terra nullius” which, much like the previous version on the Earth, is a definition designed to protect the user. It is a sad, cruel, and deeply narrow way to view the Solar System, which is full of planets, moons, and asteroids that record the history of the universe, a history we are only just beginning to read. It is also a reminder that advocates of “space resource utilization,” of which there are many, would happily dig as deep into Kenari as possible, simply because they could.
On Aldhani, where Cassian Andor assists a small rebel cell’s imperial heist, Andor illustrates the critical function of cultural exploitation within empire. The Empire views the people of Aldhani, and their culture, as disposable, an impediment to the Empire’s ability to use the planet as a distribution hub. But it doesn’t waste resources on killing them, when it can instead force, coerce, and otherwise encourage those who live in the coveted highlands (where the Empire plans to build an airstrip) to collect in the lowlands and work in Imperial factories. This serves two purposes: engaging more people in the Empire’s logistical machinery, which is necessary for its domination, and eroding their cultural practices, to strip them of their heritage and thereby their independence.
The Empire plans to eradicate the people of Aldhani by flattening their culture, forcing their artificial homogenization to facilitate its own political and economic control. As stated by Empire officials in the Aldhani Garrison, the Empire’s efforts to this effect have included impeding, though not banning, the performance of sacred rites, forcibly altering economic systems to funnel the workforce into industrialized factories, and adding diversions, such as “Comfort Units” on a popular pilgrimage route to interfere with and distract from long-held cultural practices. The Empire is waging a war of cultural attrition; it is counting on people’s exhaustion with their constant goalpost-shifting to do the work for them, and ensure that the Aldhani culture dies out, leaving behind malleable workers in its place.
The Empire’s approach to Aldhani is specific, detailed, and very much reminiscent of historical empires on Earth. The removal and supplantation of existing cultures in the service of imperialism is a fundamental means by which empires consolidate and expand their power. American and Canadian residential schools and the French policy of forced assimilation in colonized Africa were both expansive, governmentally sanctioned strategies to erase and replace native cultures to benefit the dominant (white) culture. Such programs had an essential moralizing component, helped along by concepts like Manifest Destiny in the U.S. that justified expansionism and its accompanying forced assimilation as an inherent moral good. These policies, and the mindsets that fueled them, yielded massive harm that reverberates through generations.
The colonizing mindset remains invariably present, if less overt, in how nation-states and companies approach space exploration. Since the beginning of the Space Race, American “Manifest Destiny” narratives have run rampant. Space became the ultimate frontier in the American psyche, a natural extension of their westward expansion; thus, to explore space became a moral mandate. Colonial narratives continue to dominate popular discourse about human spaceflight, particularly in the hopes of colonizing and/or terraforming Mars. Such a project requires completely overprinting the planetary environment, forcing it to conform to a state that best suits human settlers, without consideration of what is lost if we nuke the ice caps, add massive orbital mirrors, or otherwise change its atmosphere and surface to suit our needs. Whether life existed on Mars, or could exist in the future, is less important than whether that life is ours. If humanity’s destiny is to explore the stars, then to many, that means having the power to bend them to our will.
To envision planetary colonization as an uncomplicated good, as seen in the many comparisons of space missions to the voyages of Christopher Columbus, requires ignoring the devastating consequences of colonialism on Earth. It assumes that, because our history has culminated in our current capability to explore the stars, that it is a net force for good; it then goes further, to assume that because colonialism is a net force for good, it must continue. It’s relatively easy to reject the vision of ecological disaster presented by Kenari. It is much harder to confront the insidiousness of colonialism’s human side that Aldhani represents. Colonialism and imperialism are more than just their overt atrocities; they are systems that form a way of life, and that makes deconstructing their influence on space exploration much harder.
Lastly, on Narkina V, a planet which has been turned into a factory staffed by prison labor, Andor confronts the reality of empire as one of physical exploitation. The prisoners of Narkina V are subject to a corrupt justice system that imprisons them for years over invented misdemeanors, and a prison industrial complex that uses them as an infinitely replaceable free labor for the Empire. In the process, Cassian and his fellow prisoners are actively, aggressively dehumanized. It is empire in its most base state: a machine that turns humans into parts.
Narkina V is the culmination of all that’s come before in Andor. An empire’s extractive view of the planets and landscapes under its control is ultimately in symbiosis with an extractive view of its populace; as such, the tendency of empire is to maximize the number of those it can imprison or otherwise surveil. Those that are privileged or lucky enough to avoid the Empire’s prison-industrial complex are conscious of the ISB intelligence apparatus that spins its web around them. From Cassian Andor, trapped in obscurity on Narkina V, to Mon Mothma, trapped in opulence on Coruscant, there can be no safety in empire. The only variation is in how expansive the illusion of freedom can be.
Grinding human life beneath the wheel of empire is intrinsic to it, from the Roman Empire, in which enslaved people were between 10 to 20% of the population, to the modern use of prison labor to do everything from to fighting fires to harvesting turnips. In Andor, the show notes that human prisoners are “cheaper than droids, and easier to replace” — the Empire, with its veneer of technological advancement, is ultimately dependent on unpaid human labor for its achievements, much like underpaid workers in the global south are the true content moderators behind supposedly advanced AI technology like ChatGPT. The lie of technological advancement told to sell luxury to the privileged is, in both cases, built on a foundation of human suffering where the suffering is kept far enough out of sight that most can comfort themselves by pretending its absence.
The eagerness to exploit unseen, underpaid labor for technological advancement forms the basis for current visions of space futures. One major thread in discussions about “colonizing” Mars is how to incentivize such a trip, as living on Mars is guaranteed to be miserable and dangerous at best, while also keeping such an endeavor cost-effective. The answer that some have settled on, including SpaceX’s Elon Musk, is effectively indentured servitude; people will take out loans to pay for their flight to Mars, then work them off in SpaceX company towns. Jeff Bezos’ “space canister” concept is much the same, except that it instead traps people in spacefaring metal tubes rather than stranding them on Mars.
Space colonization, particularly to develop the rich havens these billionaires dream of, is a logistical problem too expensive to be solved by technology. A workforce of indentured servants is a necessary component of their plans, and why should it not be? Workers in Tesla factories workers and Amazon warehouses already experience horrifying conditions on the ground. It is not surprising that such logic would be assumed to be critical to space exploration’s success, if space exploration is indeed meant to be a process of colonization, exploitation, and extraction, for the benefit of national and corporate interests. The space future that Andor paints on Narkina V is bleak. Worse, that future is one that many prominent space futurists have no overt problem with. It is left to the rest of us to seek alternatives, if there are any to be found.
For those of us who’ve loved space exploration, what are we to do when confronted with these bleak space futures? What do we next, once we’ve finished learning the scope of space exploration’s ties to empire?
There is one way out. And, as in Andor, that way out will not be easy. Space exploration as it currently exists cannot be separated from the national, colonial project — it is a symptom of it. We must begin by thinking and talking about space exploration very differently, not just as individuals, but as a community. It is crucial to recognize that space exploration, something that has given many people hope, is inextricably political, and to share this knowledge with others. We must recognize when space exploration is being used as a shield for criticism or a distraction from misdeeds, as is the case for commercial space companies that are tied to weapons manufacturers (which is many of them). It is time to set aside the myth of space exploration as inherently noble, and recognize why that myth has been told — what truths it might hide.
I believe that it is valuable to name the problem and articulate it, as I have tried to do here. However, if our aim is to then do something about those problems, we cannot stop there While academic writing or discussions between like-minded colleagues are a great place to start, change is wrought on a much larger scale, and will include experiencing (at best) some discomfort. To think about doing space exploration differently means asking: who is space for? Is space treated as a means of gaining knowledge, or exerting dominance in a new sphere? Are those concepts truly separable? Once we have the answers to those questions, it is then time to take action.
To “fix” space exploration, to make it something that truly lives up to peoples’ dreams of it, requires structural changes on a societal level. The problem is big, so big that may seem insurmountable; but that does not absolve any of us of the responsibility to try. If you work in the space industry, that may mean academic boycotts, conference disruptions and/or strikes, and other concerted efforts to call attention to the financial ties between space exploration and the military-industrial complex. That may also mean engaging in the issues of your local community, and working to support their struggles. It may mean fighting a thousand little battles, in academic departments and in solidarity encampments, to keep pushing the needle. It may mean losing those battles more than you win. But remember this: making change is the work of a lifetime.
Remember this: try.
